Drama, Bins, and an Ambulance

Litter picking is hardly glamorous but seems to be the activity 'a la mode' these days. F has been collecting litter since at least 1974 - her last year of junior school - when she and a class mate organized a litter pick in their village which was so successful the class mates decided to clean every road in the district and make a competition out of it.

There was no instagram to publish it on in those days.

F has gone on picking up rubbish pretty much every since.  Not as a devoted hobby or activity but usually when an area around or near where she lives is 'crying out for some attention'.  A good clean up like that is strangely satisfying; dragging bags of detritus back to the bins, sorting the recycling, enjoying the pristine space afterwards.

Bins: collection day is Fridays. Rubbish one week, recycling the next. Neighbours on one side are a ragtag band of people who haven't chosen to live together but have simply rented separate rooms in a big house.  Their attention to putting out bins is driven by practicality rather than devotion.  Bin collection over Christmas and New Year is rescheduled so the Friday collection became Tuesday.  Nevertheless their bins went to the bottom of our drive on Friday (at least the programming works).  However, from Friday to Tuesday the bins sat forlornly through a couple of raging storms, the lids flipping back and forth, their contents being lifted out and distributed....

After the beach clean up on 30th, F's litter grabber sat by the shoe rack with the intention that it would be deployed on Sunday collecting up the redistributed waste.

First, Sunday 10.30am was the date and time agreed on for a theatre outing with grandson - Mr B had booked seats at Three Billy Goats Gruff in the Minerva Theatre in Chichester.  I do believe a good time was had by all but it took the lad a while to warm up to the spirit of the event. He was remarkably resistant to suspending disbelief; the troll's hairy belly being the first object of his 'that's not real is it?'  Followed by 'he hasn't got any paint in that can'.

Theatre isn't 'real' mate - but it is real fun if you go along with the story.  Don't kids play make-believe these days?

He declined any extension to the outing to include a cafe or pizza, insisting instead that we go home so that he could re-engage with one of his Christmas presents.

Imagine my surprise then, when I was out pulling cans and bottles from the undergrowth along our lane later, to hear lad come bounding out, dressed for a winter excursion, and wanting to join me gathering litter.  It might have been the grabbing stick. He operated it from that point onward except when an even longer reach was required, and in no time at all we had a large sack full of bottles, cans, 'food' wrappers and smoking waste. Rain halted play.  I'm ready for a dash home and he's complaining that there more trees we haven't scavenged under.  He took some convincing that rubbish under there probably isn't going anywhere until the next time we tackle this operation.

Now he wants a litter grabber of his own.  

He has a birthday in three weeks.  I promised him one.  His mother thinks a litter grabber is a weird birthday present (and maybe it is, but if that's what he wants why try and find some other plastic toy or piece of technology that he doesn't already have and which will only join all the other bits he lost interest in or broke within minutes of opening them at Christmas time).

During our intergenerational litter pick, Great Old Nana had pressed her emergency button and a crisis was underway when we got back to the house.  Mr B raced off to avert escalating drama - the unnecessary call-out of an ambulance.  Nana had been told by her carer to press the button if she felt unwell, but the moth-eaten mind had not understood the need to talk to the first responder on the other end of the emergency communications system.  She kept sending messages to her daughter's phone saying she was 'hearing voices'.  Amusing though that was in the circumstances, it is fortunate that Mr B's phone is one of the next of kin calls that the emergency services can make before the whole response thing goes nuclear.  The ambulance call-out was cancelled and hopefully the service was employed somewhere it was really needed.

Well we can't complain that 2023 ended on a fizzle.  Here's to a 2024 with more theatre and less of the drama.

Cue: Mission Impossible music.....

End note: the lad insisted on counting the cans he collected, 34 from one block; all now in the recycling.